Review Essay
Majesty and the Arts:
Queen Anne’s Cultural Revolution
Philip Smallwood
University of Bristol
James Anderson Winn. Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (New York: Oxford Univ.,
2014). Pp. xxi + 792. 35 b/w ills., 18 color inserts, 28 musical examples. $39.95
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If monarchs now matter little to artists (or artists to monarchs), there have
been times when art and the governance of nations have seemed “harmoniously confus’d.” The very early years of the eighteenth century are well known
for their harnessing of poetry and theater to the factional antagonisms of parliamentary politics. The patronage operating most famously was the hiring of
artists in the service of party, and relations between royalty and the artistic
culture of the period have perhaps gone comparatively unremarked because
the reigning monarch had seemed to historians ineffectually obscure, or unduly
impressionable, or simply a woman.
So a change now seems timely. And if “magisterial” is praise often
accorded to the biggest and most ambitious books, in the case of James A.
Winn’s monumental Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts, the description appears
strikingly apt. Winn has constructed a work of encyclopedic proportions and
mesmerizing detail, indispensable to the professional scholar, yet aimed in part
(optimistically, perhaps) at the curious general reader. Numerous British and
American archives have been consulted; a wide range of manuscript collections
Eighteenth-Century Life
Volume 39, Number 2, April 2015 doi 10.1215/00982601-2875338
Copyright 2015 by Duke University Press
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Majest y and t he A r ts: Queen A nn’s Cu lt u ra l Revolut ion 6 7
and many hundreds of primary and secondary printed sources have been synthesized. The result is a sympathetic and painstaking account of the queen’s
distinctive contract with ministers, artists, people, and Parliament.
In her prize-winning Queen Anne: the Politics of Passion (2012), the historical biographer Anne Somerset has comparatively little to say about poets,
composers, and other artists who flourished in the first decade of the eighteenth century, concentrating on political intrigue and Anne’s spats with rival
ministers. Somerset tells very affectingly the moving human story of the monarch’s poignantly fraught and terminally deteriorating relationship with Sarah
Churchill, the appalling Duchess of Marlborough. Winn covers this ground
excellently too, with generous quotations from letters between Anne and Sarah
placed at the epicenter of the volume, albeit as part of a more circuitous and
digressive narrative overall (where extended chapters subheaded by day, month,
and year cover many events within a period and are fixed thematically by their
titles). This narrative can be achingly slow-paced—the work is very long, and
its kaleidoscopic particularity creates a tension with the hope of reaching readers outside the academic fold. Winn in the process elaborates the many ways in
which “arts” (in the modern gathered-together sense) are woven into the contemporary political and personal fabric, and he illuminates, in company with
this, a further dimension of Anne’s temperament and taste.
Anne comes over as vulnerable in various ways. She suffered from persistent ill health and, in endlessly thwarted hopes of an heir to the throne, she
was for much of her adult life “bigg with child.” But she is also revealed as a
“Strict and religious Observer of [her] Word,” dignified, loyal to all who served
her loyally, a pragmatic and principled, even idealistic, figure, and to the end,
a partial enigma. Her personality, her femininity, her private tragedies, and
her enthusiasms all play their parts in this phase of English cultural life, while
the precarious statecraft of her reign reveals the resilience Anne brought to the
task of saving the nation. Winn moves fluidly from text to context, and context
to text, operating where necessary by tactful suggestion; where hard evidence
is missing or remains ambiguous, he offers judicious deduction. This is not a
work of rigid historical positivism. Historical imagination is exercised as the
need arises and is in turn demanded of the reader. We view the period with
a recharged sense of completeness and with attention to a biographical center
hitherto overlooked: world events and the artifacts of cultural history are ready
explanations for each other.
Anne’s familiarity with the stage, as child actress and audience, is part of
her girlhood: she makes early acquaintance with John Crowne’s court masque
Calisto, and Nathaniel Lee’s drama of Mithridates. Both plays afford Winn
parallels with contemporary events and unfold Anne’s early life through intimacy with grown-up sexual and political situations in fictional-historical form.
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Anne’s youth was exposed to the burgeoning public arts of royal portraiture,
dedicatory poems, and musical celebrations. Winn’s subtitle, celebrating Anne
as the artists’ “Patroness,” originates from an anonymous birthday ode printed
before her coronation and serves as an epigraph to the volume. In the course
of her reign, the dramatist and architect Sir John Vanbrugh commissioned a
ceiling painting for his new Queen’s Theatre depicting “Queen Anne’s Patronage of the Arts.” The financial patronage of poets or other artists that Anne
furnished from the royal coffers may in the event be hard to assess, but Winn’s
drift is that Anne could galvanize an artistic community seeking invigoration
after the indifference of William of Orange.
Prior to her coronation in 1702, and out of favor with Queen Mary, her
sister, Anne withdrew from the court, and found time to pursue artistic interests undisturbed. Winn tells in fascinating detail how, while still a very young
woman, Anne developed the passion for the arts that she brought to her official
role, and so to her country. In Winn’s exposition of specific examples of painting, poetry, or music against history and biography, the issues are sometimes
painfully personal. Thus, Winn tells the story of a moment when Anne brings
to mind a favorite poem by “her beloved ‘Mr. Cowley’,” where the country
mouse is glutted at the feast furnished by his smarter host in town. The anecdote occasions Winn’s critical examination of the verses, and the lines invite
poetical enjoyment on their own terms, but Cowley’s text also draws attention
to Anne’s consciousness of the disabling obesity that first made her an object of
derision in her lifetime, and has permitted a certain amount of ignorant prejudice against her ever since.
Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts is a beautiful and generously illustrated volume. The work is richly informative, filled with anecdote and direct quotation
while thoughtfully affording access to recordings of rare contemporary music,
and musical settings for poetry, much of it not previously recorded. These are
available through an associated website, while printings of original instrumental and vocal scores appear in attractive format on the page. An apparatus of
extensive scholarly endnotes, many of a highly discursive nature, underpins
the text. This is a study that blurs the boundary between biography and history. Winn comments with textbook authority on the great dramas and complex transactions of contemporary international events, including the Duke of
Marlborough’s glorious victories in Europe on the queen’s behalf (for which
Blenheim Palace was his magnificent reward), and on topics relating to Parliament or the court, with its endless religious and political shenanigans. Winn
is scrupulous in tracing personal enmities, friendships, and reluctant, insecure,
but necessary alliances. Yet he can also explain letters between Anne and her
noble male or female counterparts or ministers with a literary critic’s attention
to vocabulary, syntax, shades of self-protective irony, or cunning insinuation.
Majest y and t he A r ts: Queen A nn’s Cu lt u ra l Revolut ion 6 9
At one point (439-40), Winn analyzes the role of cadence and stress patterns
in the sermon delivered by Dr. Henry Sacheverell, a performance for which he
famously faced trial. Winn’s volume elucidates deeper political meanings that
a historian lacking an ear for linguistic resonance might miss.
As a commentator on the arts in their own right, Winn is equally assured.
He writes engagingly on the consolations and entertainments of literature,
theater, dance, opera, acting, gardening, and painting, and he is especially
sensitive to the technical desiderata of contemporary musical composition, settings for poetry, interludes, and performance. This is a rare accomplishment
for a literary commentator or cultural historian. One example of the work’s
polymathic perspective is Winn’s attention to the role of theatrical expertise in executing regal pageants designed to remind the nation of the locus of
power, legitimacy, and authority. He observes that Anne, as even King William before her, “understood the importance of maintaining the public drama
of royal activities” (235).
Some works that touched the consciousness of Queen Anne are inevitably very minor art, and they gather meaning from the events that generated
them: the poems by Cambridge students on the death of Anne’s only son, the
eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, are a case in point. But Winn’s treatment
of Anne, who on her coronation declared to both Houses of Parliament that
her heart was “entirely English,” does more than appeal to an artistic milieu
in order to draw historical conclusions. Winn shows that the narrative of her
reign can invite renewed attention to some of the greatest musical genius of
Western civilization: Ambrose Philips’s birthday ode for Anne of 1713 was
“set by no less a composer than George Frideric Handel” (247). Anne’s reign
is also the landscape for the great literary accomplishments composed in the
shadow of Dryden’s death (1700), an event as momentous for the cultural life
of the country as the tragic loss, in the same year, of Anne’s cherished heir to
the throne.
Anne patronized major poetic productions of her lifetime—as Princess
Anne, she and her husband, George of Denmark, subscribed to Dryden’s
translation of Virgil of 1697. More problematically, perhaps, for Anne as the
period’s “Patroness of Arts,” her reign precisely coincided with the early rise of
Alexander Pope, Dryden’s worthiest successor, and the eighteenth-century’s
greatest poet, who had no time for patrons. As the poet who single handedly broke the system, Pope achieved a modern reputation based heavily on
the angrier and more aggressive satires—both personal and political—of the
1730s and 1740s, yet the ease and delightfulness of Pope’s precocious decade,
the optimistic period under Queen Anne, speaks of a writer working in more
harmonious unity with his time than proved possible under the Hanoverians.
As Anne sought to steer her country’s cultural energies at the start of a new
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century, this is the happier Pope who had not yet retreated into an embattled
defense of his poetic reputation, nor cultivated a self-image profoundly at odds
with a degenerate age. Pope found his feet at the time of Queen Anne, and
as a very young man composed some of his best poetical work. Winn calls
Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713) “the finest and most subtle poem on public affairs
to appear during her reign” (601). He intimates that patronage of poets need
not be personal to make a difference.
It follows that among the most suggestive pages of the volume are those
devoted to the early Pope (too few, perhaps, for a work that quotes and discusses such a quantity of mediocre literature). An Essay on Criticism (1711) is
usefully examined in parallel with the knife-edge politics of Anne’s negotiation of Whig and Tory or Protestant and Catholic passions, where “Parties in
Wit attend on those of State,” and Winn is engagingly precise in explaining
that Pope is “using political imagery to illustrate the aesthetic, psychological,
and moral principles that form his true subject” (561). In teasing out the politics
of this and other early poems, such as the two-canto version of the Rape of the
Lock, Winn intriguingly conjoins contextual circumstance and literary quality: the “little Queen Anne’s man,” as Byron was later to call Pope, chimes in
with his monarch’s determined anti-sectarianism, and offers poetic and critical
analogies for her ambitions of political settlement, both at home and abroad.
By affording a clearer knowledge of the period’s artistic milieu and of what it
might mean to be “Patroness of Arts” at that time, Winn’s capacious mass of
learning and broad-ranging reconstruction of cultural life under Queen Anne
returns us to these poems in a more fully imagined contextual light.
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